164 comments:

To ensure that the American Jobs Act is fully paid for, the President will call on the Joint Committee to come up with additional deficit reduction necessary to pay for the Act and still meet its deficit target.

A future Congress will be called on to implement budget cuts, which will, of course, never be made.

"Watch the enhanced version of the President's Address to Congress which features graphs, charts," and a paragraph on the back of each one, explaining what each one was to be used as evidence against us.

So...I take it this one is only 1000 pages the Dem politicians won't read? Do we need to pass this one to find out what's in it? Perhaps we need a stimulus for congressional legal aides to make sure SOMEONE reads the damned bill this time.

Oy. Obama wanted $500-billion. And, he got it. The rest of the speech doesn't matter. To give away money, the senate went along.

There's also another reality. You can see it in the way people belt tighten when dealing with economic downturns. We are there, now. So growing anything at all may well be impossible.

If things got boyant? Boy, then people get like those arabs and jump through hoops to do "arab-springs." Highly overrated.

You want a show of an old executive now on trial? Go look at egypt. You think it's just Mubarak caged on a gurney? Try the whole lot of egyptians are now sunk in this mire. And, they can't get out! (On the other hand, over a six day period of time, the Israelis, with the help of the Americans, extracted all their personnel for Egypt, safely.)

Obama got to learn some lessons, too, all over again. About the saud's. And, the arabs in general.

While, oddly enough, Kaddafi keeps hanging on. (Did you know when you hear "Sahara" ... and Kaddafi is hiding someplace in the Sahara ... the the vastness of that desert is LARGER than the size of the USA? Check it out on a map!

Assad is also holding on.

We're lucky we're not under the thumbs of a despot! That we're arguing "less government?" Probably so. Cuts ahead. But whose gonna become unemployed? More white people?

You didn't know most teachers are white?

Nah. No awakening. Business as usual. It's an environment actually favorable to Obama. Not so much to Perry. Or Michele Bachmann. I don't even give Mitt a passing shot.

You know, you can read it if you want. But if the Dems lose both of the special elections tomorrow-- no one expected a win in Nevada, but NY will be a very public embarrassment-- you will see every Democrat in Congress backing away from passing anything from Obama as fast as they can.

Actually, you can't read it. The White House hasn't released the text of this Act because the White House hasn't written the text it is lecturing Congress to pass.

Even if Congress passes 100% of what Obama asked for, there are 25.6 million people looking for full time work in this country and even the New York Times' economists estimate that Obama's job's plan would create at most 1 to 1.5 million jobs.

Obama doesn't even have a plan for the other 23 million people who want full-time work but can't find it thanks to his piss poor leadership.

The giving everyone a chance to refinance at 4% is just another way to say there is no longer any value in personal economic responsibility. Simply being alive entitles you to the same interest rate as those who have spent a lifetime making careful conservative economic decisions for themselves and their families.

I get a break on payroll tax; and a tax credit for hiring a wounded vet; and another credit for hiring someone who's been chronically unemployed.

So I just have to find a wounded vet who's been chronically unemployed, and hire him to...sweep the floor, over and over, I guess. And I'll get about $10,000 in tax credits, back from the hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxes that I pay in.

Score!

And I don't have much to do, so I was really looking forward to several thousand more pages of obscurely worded government documents that I can comb through to find all of these little Easter eggs that Easter Bunny Obama has sprinkled about the garden.

I suspect that if the wounded vet is also a left-handed ginger, I might get an extra $875. This shit's fun, it's like doing sudoku; only with more federal prison involved if you solve it incorrectly.

Oh, and I get to update Peachtree to put this temporary change in withholding rates in there. Love, love, love to update Peachtree.

And thank goodness we can start renovating all of these run-down commercial properties. Because that's what you do with money, when you're in a super-saturated commercial real estate market -- you spruce those motherfuckers up.

Simply being alive entitles you to the same interest rate as those who have spent a lifetime making careful conservative economic decisions for themselves and their families.

This! Some complained back when the original housing bubble burst and the federal government was trying bail people out of their underwater mortgages. I specifically remember panel members on Hardball making the same point as above; that people that made wise choices, bought a house they could offord and plan for the future were getting screwed.

Matthews said, "Life's not fair."

If only the rest of the left would discover this axiomatic truth about life.

In the world of liberal ethics you are entitled to wake up everyday with a clean slate, never to be hindered by the mistakes you made yesterday, or the previous week or any previous time in your life. Accountability for previous actions is to them an unnecessary hindrance to happiness in this current moment. And heaven forbid anyone should have to struggle, because struggling sounds like suffering, and suffering no matter how slight cannot be tolerated in the utopia we are creating for ourselves.

Decreasing the interest rate means bank stock owners and bondholders will see a decrease in their interest income and dividends. So the stimulus effect could very well be a wash. But it will redistribute income which is always Prez Obama's No. 1 Goal.

The Nevada race can't be very tight. I am sitting up here in Montana, and never got anything in the mail back in Nevada to vote. If you get out of Reno proper, it is hard to find any Democrats in that district, and, esp. not now.

Ok, at my office there, there were a majority, but probably some of the only Dems in town.

If the Democrat wins in NV, I will kick myself for not voting. But I expect that my rear end is safe. We shall see.

I imagine the federal government as a someone walking a tightrope struggling to keep their balance. With each attempt to regain their balance their arms flail in increasingly wide arcs until the inevitable happens and they begin a steep decent toward the earth below.

I expect that Obama's bill is not going to make it unscathed. For one thing, apparently, there are provisions in it for saving 200K+ teachers' jobs, plus a lot of police and fire jobs. Which translates into more federal money to bail out their pension plans and to funnel to the DNC by their unions. Not going to happen.

And, of course, there is "infrastructure" in there too. Apparently, Obama has forgotten that there is no such thing as a shovel ready project any more.

Which reminds me of, I think, Bob Bechtol last week on the 5 on Fox. He questioned that most of the infrastructure money was aimed at unions. I couldn't figure out whether he had never heard of Davis-Bacon, or was just being his usual partisan hack self.

Which apparently can be, but hasn't been, waived - or at least it apparently can be for disasters.

Which points out that much of the delay and the reason that there is no such thing as shovel ready products is the volume of federal paperwork and the number of federal regulations that need to be satisfied before contracts can be let and construction begun.

Of course, the Executive branch issues these regulations, the very same Executive branch that President Obama theoretically heads. It would be interesting to determine how many of these regulations have been waived by his Administration in the name of expediting construction of infrastructure projects, or, just to help us get out of the recession. And, then, compare it to the number of regulations added by his Administration that hurt the recovery. However, I think that one would have to make sure that the number of regulations waived did not end up on the bottom in a division.

Just listened to Glenn Beck play "which stimulus speech was it?" Difficult to tell the difference since the ideas are identical, unless you were listening to his tone. "Jobs" bill had a definite temper tantrum attitude to it.

Immediate investments in infrastructure and a bipartisan National Infrastructure Bank,modernizing our roads, rail, airports and waterways while putting hundreds of thousands of workers back on the job.

More shovel-ready jobs? Really were they the first time? Just more union giveaways! *spit*

If this thing is anything like the "Affordable Health Care Act," there will be finely crafted "sleeper" passages tucked away here and there that will give rise to hundreds of pages of onerous regulations benefiting favored constituencies.

Um, how can someone writing a *blog* on the WH *web site* not get that the interwebs isn't just another kind of push media?

Text. In legal language, as submitted to congress. Ideally with delivery time-stamped and under revision control.

This "new media" isn't just another way to get to the proles, over heads of opinion makers and analysts. It *is also* an expectation that you'll show your work, footnote your facts, and put it all out there for people to analyze independently.

I don't know whether the idiot "media" will pick it up, but you can believe that every engaged, motivated citizen will note that we haven't been given the info to make an informed decision.

How many jobs will be destoyed by federal law suit against banks. BOA is laying off 10,000 now. Destroy the banks to make more loans??? LOL! 20% down should be required to protect industry from another housing bubble. Yes, Obama wants an election year tax cut, WTF.Next he may say drill, baby, drill to create energy jobs he has destroyed.

Obama plans to start a re-election media meme that he is being blocked from saving the jobs that he has ignored for three years when he wasn't killing jobs along with killing the USA's energy industry.

I doubt that anyone (meaning the Anmerican public) is listening to jug ears--the bill, like the President himself, is full of sound and fury and totally empty--this is simply a step in his coming campaign to villify the opposition. The sooner we are rid of this clown in the white house, the better we will be. (lest the secret service come down on me, I am referring to the electoral process)

Easy. If North Carolina has a few more bridges then they need at the moment, they deposit them in the bank. If California needs more bridges then they have, they can borrow some from the bank, and then pay them back, with interest, over time.

And thanks to the wonders of fractional banking, for every bridge that North Carolina deposits, the bank can lend 10 bridges to other states.

Easy. If North Carolina has a few more bridges then they need at the moment, they deposit them in the bank. If California needs more bridges then they have, they can borrow some from the bank, and then pay them back, with interest, over time.

@prairie wind -- Thanks for the link. You've given us one substantive detail to add to the White House's lack of information.

The White House's plan to eliminate state and local tax deductibility for high-income folks is probably a non-starter, but the Republicans should pass it. They can pretend their doing it for the greater good.

And then the wealthy will move to Texas. The Red States will get the entrepreneurs. New York City will get crushed. So will California. Expect Mayor Bloomberg and Governor Brown to both come out against this brilliant plan.

I imagine the infrastructure bank would look something like the DoE's "bank" for giving sweetheart loans to Solyndra and making sure that the private equity gets first in line on recouping their losses.

Decreasing the interest rate means bank stock owners and bondholders will see a decrease in their interest income and dividends.

Banks do NOT want to refinance your loans. Why would they? It would be a stupid business decision at this time.

Interest rates on loans are at an historic low. The bank would be locking in its income for the next 30 years at these lows, while at the same time knowing that the savings rates, their expenses, are certainly going to be going up.

Let's see

Lock in future income to a guaranteed low versus the certainty that expenses will rise in the future. What could be wrong with that business model?

The only thing that the banks can do...and WILL do, if forced to make these terrible loans is to raise fees and charges on all of the rest of us to make up the difference in income/expenses.

Get ready to be hosed by your bank and thank Obama for the experience.I'm trying to figure out how our corporation could hire me as a bookkeeper and get that 4000 credit. I've been unemployed for over 6 months. Win Win :-D

I was pondering a kitchen upgrade and a new vehicle or buying some more stock. Given the next 18 months of cluelessness, I think I will continue to John Galt that money. I know more than a few folks who think the same way. Pile up the reserves and hope that you have enough.

According to www.recovery.gov (the WH site) $33.7M has been spent in my zipcode so far. Guess how many jobs were created with that paltry sum? If you guessed one (1), you're right! That was the first American Jobs Act. Fool me once...

It seems that when Obama won the election, and created The Office of the President Elect, he proposed a $450 Billion "Stimulus" package to include money for teachers, and firefighters, and infrastructure, even creating an infrastructure bank based on the European model, targeted tax incentives for special interests, payroll tax holiday, etc...

Naturally, by the time Pelosi and Reid got done writing it, it had swelled to well over $1Trillion, and had to be scaled back.

Oh, about that infrastructure bank that nobody seems to remember Obama had to put in his back pocket for another time-

Obama had an inch thick stack of paper held together with a black binder clip in his hand this morning. Of course it probably was/could have been a stack of blank paper with a brightly colored cover sheet on top.

In the very near future I expect Moody's to, once again, remind President Downgrade what gave birth to the tea party movement, and what ushered in an unprecedented and historic republican power sweep just mere months ago.

Hoosier, and why do they discriminate against married couples? A single can make up to $200K but a couple only $250K. So, if my husband makes $175K I can only make up to $75K before we'd hit the ceiling, but if I was single, I could make up to $200K before hitting the same ceiling.

The man is formidable. He asks the deficit committee to pay for the jobs plan ($0.5T), so they have to find $2T instead of $1.5T ($1.5T was agreed on in the recent debt ceiling limit debate). Then he comes out with suggestions about how to pay for his jobs plan--and picks all the low hanging fruit the deficit committee would have picked anyway to reach their original goal of $1.5T. Now he can say, "I figured out how to pay for the jobs plan." Leaves them on the hook for the remaining $1.5T. But gets his own wishlist paid for up front.

And now we see why Obama has been hiding his "jobs" plan ... it's a stealth tax increase ... one of the highest in history ... and breaks his campaign pledge of not raising taxes on any one making less then $250,000 a year.

Obama had an inch thick stack of paper held together with a black binder clip in his hand this morning. Of course it probably was/could have been a stack of blank paper with a brightly colored cover sheet on top.

It is not Obama's intention to have this bill pass. He knows it's sloppy, ineffective, and is basically the Recovery Act 2.0. He knows it will fail in the House, and then he can spend 14 months blaming Republicans for obstructionism.

If the bill wasn't a total fustercluck, I'd suggest the Republicans go ahead and pass it so it can fail just as miserably as Recovery Act 1.0. Unfortunately, the consequences of it passing are too ghastly to imagine.

I can't read it. I can only read a pre-digested press release that purports to show the results of the bill, not the details. When the Patient Protection and Affordable Act was passed, I read most of it online and it scared the pants off me.

After all the humiliation, torture, and tragedy this administration has subjected us to, and the shocking reality that there are still people faithful enough to re-elect Obama, I think we all feel like American Jobs. Hence the bill's title. It's not about jobs; it's a Bible reference!

Actually it did work as it was intended, and only around 200 billion of it was slated for infrastructure type jobs.

You might want to consult with Christina Romer to see if it "worked as it was intended." And why can't liberals get it through their heads that transfer payments and tax cuts are, under neo-Keynesian theory, as-if-not-more stimulative than infrastructure spending? Regardless of how it was comprised, we had $800 billion in "stimulus" spending that failed. It is absurd to think less would do more.

For instance, Fox reports that the president’s plan eliminates the deductions for state and local taxes paid. The administration estimates that the new taxes would raise $400 billion of the $447 billion price tag of the jobs package.

Obama had an inch thick stack of paper held together with a black binder clip in his hand this morning. Of course it probably was/could have been a stack of blank paper with a brightly colored cover sheet on top.

All work and no play makes Barack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Barack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Barack a dull boy.

As several other commenters have pointed out, the post doesn't link to the bill, and none of the links on the page to which it does go link in turn to the bill. Nor have I been able to get to the bill by searching around on the WH site. I think a corrected post is in order...

This morning, Obama told us that the bill he four days ago demanded that Congress pass "right away" would be available tongiht. What if, gee, what if... this is all we're getting? What if this is what he plans to send to Congress?

I mean—LOL—where's the bill, Mr. President? You told Congress you'd send it to them, and you demanded that they pass it right away. Is this it? This is it? Tell us that this isn't it. Tell us that you have an actual bill to send to Congress, not just a recipe whence they can bake their own bill.

Where is the text of the actual bill? Is there an actual bill yet? And if so, how does it propose to pay for what it provides? "Call[ing] on the Joint Committee to come up with additional deficit reduction" yada yada yada doesn't come close to being a legislative appropriation.

Seems quite clear to me that Mr Obama remains clueless about the economy. This bullshit he is putting forward is only to generate talking points for his campaign for reelection. Mr Obama is simply a sorry piece of shit. The worst president evahhhh--without class, intelligence or decency.

Extending the "payroll tax holiday" (it's only a discount from the regular amounts) and extending it to the employer as well only reduces the time until the social security and medicare entitlements are out of money.

I wouldn't be surprised if the administration doesn't make any adjustments to the "earned income credit" which is nothing more than a rebate of the payroll taxes paid in for lower income families. This is one way lower income families get refunds on their income taxes that are greater than income taxes withheld.

And the lower income taxpayers get "credit" on their future social security and medicare payments of the amounts withheld, not the actual amounts paid in.

One more example of the United States Government spending the same dollar three times.

I doubt if anything good happened on obama's watch when he was a community organizer. He has absolutely no clue where money comes from, or how to use it to generate a profit. To him, it's lets get some taxpayer money and spend it.

AP: In a sharp challenge to the GOP, President Barack Obama proposed paying for his costly new jobs plan Monday with tax hikes that Republicans have already rejected, and he accused them of political motives if they still refuse to go along.

"The only thing that's stopping it is politics," Obama declared.

Of course it's politics. The whole point of the political process is to sort out competing viewpoints. The Republicans were elected to oppose Obama's spending and tax increases, among other things. They will do so. Then Obama will say "the Republicans" did not compromise. Then there will be another election. Which might actually settle a few things. For a while.

Hoosier Daddy said:"... Meanwhile, Fox News just showed some Obama henchman in a press conference admitting that taxes would be going up on people making $200,000 or couples making $250,000 in order to pay for it...."

Well no shit. There aren't enough millionaires and billionaires to pay for all the things government wants to spend money on.

There is no f-ing bill. There is a blog entry that invites us to read the "details" of the bill. There is a 3-page fact sheet "about" said bill. There is a somewhat lengthier "overview" about the bill, as though someone has read it already and is summarizing it for the masses. There is no bill. Is there?

I noted at the time that O's address did not annoyingly say "Pass this bill now." Rather, he annoyingly said "Pass this bill right away." In Clinton-speak, "now" was not operative, so he parsed another phrase. There is no bill for anyone to pass. But I guarantee O will lecture us through November 2012 about how Congress refused to follow his instructions.

There is a bill, by the way, with actual text. It will take quite a while to read to see with it actually says.

I suggest not focusing on the tax increases but in the additional bureaucracies and sub agencies created to spend the money. Looks like a compendium of doubtful ideas, coupled with the creation of agencies that will require permeant funding.

Unfortunately, the consequences of it passing are too ghastly to imagine.I think the Repubs should pass all the tax increases he wants (esp. the increases in blue states), but make them expire January 2013. Call his bluff!

Downloaded the highlights. It is vastly inferior to the Romney Economic Recovery Plan. It is DOA. It does more harm than good and I think there are details even moderate Dems will conclude are absolutely out of the question.

But some comments on this abortion:

Pastafarian had a fine post at 12:11.And Lilybart was dead on - bill passes and his/her job is lost the next week - they are no longer in an Obama-favored group to find a new job.

I'll add a few things.

1. No employer chip-in for financially troubled Medicare/SS if they raise workers wages??? Great. Let's all raise workers wages to get out of the tax! Just who covers the missing funds? Later generations?

2. Subsidized wages for jobs for "low income" youth and adults? Does that mean no more min wages for "select" Obama constituency groups like "low income" illegals and inner city people with skills problems?

3. 4% mortgages for those who are such credit risks they can't get the 3.26-4.25 mortgage refis now available without more Gov't IOUs to China. (Oh, I forgot...his plan raises taxes on business owners making over 200K a year to pay for any new employees they hire, the payroll taxes they cut, and the refis that low wage people can get.)

4. Much does not go to new jobs, but propping up already hired government union employees in states that refuse to cut back on gov workers they can't afford. Expecting people and leaders in states that did negotiate staffing reductions or union givebacks givebacks to keep California, Philadephia, etc. in the spend on government past your means, business.

***Anyways, it is moot and DOA. The wiser people around Obama know it and are already positioning for his reelection that he had all these great ideas to create jobs and keep hero government employees like teachers, firefighters, and cops in total job security..but for those Evil Republicans!!***

(Not a thing about looking at jobs-killing regulations it costs nothing to get rid of or addressing China's currency manipulation)

a) INCREASED TARGET FOR JOINT SELECT COMMITTEE.— Section 401(b)(2)of the Budget Control Act of 2011 is amended by striking “$1,500,000,000,000” and inserting“$1,950,000,000,000”.(b) TRIGGER FOR JOINT SELECT COMMITTEE . – Section 302 of the BudgetControl Act of 2011 is amended by redesignating subsection (b) as subsection (c) and byinserting after subsection (a) the following new subsection:“(b) TRIGGER.— If a joint committee bill achieving an amount greater than“$1,650,000,000,000” in deficit reduction as provided in section 401(b)(3)(B)(i)(II) of this Act is enacted by January 15, 2012, then the amendments to the Internal RevenueCode of 1986 made by subtitles A through E of title IV of the American Jobs Act of 2011, shall not be in effect for any taxable year.

Obama is upping the committee's goal from 1.5t to 1.95t. But he is not upping the trigger for automatic across the board cuts above 1.2t. Instead, he is inserting a new trigger at 1.65t. If the 1.65t target is met, then the tax increases included in his bill ( corp jets, oil and gas, etc ) do not go into effect.

So he's amending the Budget Control Act to stack the default action in the Democrat's favor.

Actually it did work as it was intended, and only around 200 billion of it was slated for infrastructure type jobs.

No it didn't. How many times did they have to move the goal posts to make "as intended" work? Why did they have to invent the term "saved jobs?" Why...wait a minute.

Maybe you meant it worked as intended because it paid off Democratic constituencies, provided funds to keep unionized, dues-paying public sector workers employed and transferred wealth from the producers to the non-producers. In that case, you'd be absolutely right.

It is the prospect of 4 more years of this shit that makes it imperative that Republicans do not field a far-right candidate that will lose, lose with ideological purity honored and the hushpuppy munchers rooting them as the ticket goes down in flames - but "Send a Message!!" a la Goldwater or Sharron Angle.

We know how much LBJ and Harry Reid heeded the "Message Sent to them and DC".

garage, claiming that the ARRA stimulus "worked as intended" is really about par for your brazen misrepresentations here.

The White House predicted the unemployment rates "with" and "without" the stimulus. The actual unemployment rates exceeded the "without" prediction. So by definition, the stimulus bill did not work as intended by the Obama administration's own standards.